Faith Inspires: World Faith Demonstrates How Religion Can Work For Peace

Editor's note: Every week, HuffPost Religion shines a spotlight on religious people doing good work in their communities. If you would like to recommend a faith-inspired organization, initiative or person in your community, send an email to religion@huffingtonpost.com or tweet to @huffpostrelig using the hashtag #faithinspires.

This week’s Faith Inspires highlights World Faith, an NGO whose mission is to “counter religious extremism and strife by demonstrating how faith can inform work for unity and peace, rather than hate, war, and division.”

Frank Fredericks, World Faith’s founder and executive director, founded the organization in New York City after seeing first-hand the human cost of religious conflict in Egypt and Lebanon. Noticing that it was primarily young people who were the perpetrators and victims of violence, Frank wanted to promote interfaith cooperation by "mobilizing religiously-diverse young people to serve their communities in local development projects." The result: World Faith. World Faith believes in "dialogue through action" and today their projects range from women’s empowerment, education, and HIV/AIDS sensitization to economic justice, peace-building, and environmental issues.

Originally founded as a campus club at New York University in 2006, World Faith has grown tremendously in the last six years. World Faith has taken a grassroots approach, and formed partnerships with local NGOs in South Asia, Middle East, Africa and around the United States. As of now, it has 17 chapters in 14 countries. In 2011, more than 500 activists volunteered over 16,000 hours in 10 countries and impacted the lives of over 50,000.

HuffPost Religion applauds the good work of World Faith. You can follow them on Twitter, and like them on Facebook. You can also check out their blog.